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Richard Price Reads from "Lush Life"

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:14:28 +0100

"Let me go and I'll tell you who shot that white kid."

Transcript:

I want to read a passage, it’s almost a monologue. After the murder of this kid in the Lower East Side, the whole community is kind of turned upside down looking for the shooters. One of the people who didn’t get the message that he’s not supposed to live in the Lower East Side anymore is this junkie who sees a crime of opportunity and snatches a bag in front of Schiller’s and tries to get away with it and he gets grabbed by the bouncer. The first thing he says in a panic is “Let me go and I’ll tell you who shot that white kid.” So they have to truck him down in the middle of the night to see the catching detective, who’s this guy Maddie Clark. The two cops in this scene are Maddie Clark and there’s a guy named Iocone, who’s another cop who basically lives in the windowless bunkroom, has been for six months; comes out every once in awhile with a toothbrush, shower clogs, and does police work and then goes back into the bunkroom. So this is about three o’clock in the morning and this is taking place in an interview room in the 7th Precinct. “This city, Lester Kaufmann said, one knee crossed over the other, a cuffed hand dangling languidly from the restraint bar. People are doing so well, you know, but you can’t ask them for shit anymore. It’s never been so bad. Maddie grunted in sympathy. The bouncer had told him that the first thing this guy had said when he grabbed them after the attempted purse snatching in front of Berkman’s was ‘Let me go and I’ll tell you who shot that white kid.’ ‘I swear man,’ Lester said to Maddie for the 10th time in the last half hour, ‘I just said that like in a panic, like the first thing that came into my head, what’s left of my head.’ Unfortunately, Maddie believed him. Lester yawned like a lion, revealing a dull steel ball pierced through his tongue. Iocone roused from sleep for this, yawned in response. ‘But I’ll tell you man, I’m really worried about my girlfriend. I gave her $100 to get me something, you know, get me well. She said 15 minutes and left me standing there three hours. I had no idea where she went, what happened to her, 15 minutes. I mean, I never would have done that if she didn’t leave me there like half the night watching everybody coming out of that place for a smoke, drunker and drunker, half the damned bags right on the sidewalks.’ Another titanic yawn, the dull, dirty tongue pierce winking. ‘Sucks,’ Iocone said. Strapped for a partner, Maddie had cajoled him out of the bunkroom with the promise of overtime and an easy commute. ‘I mean, I’m fucked. I know it but can you just check your computer and see if she’s in the system? I’m hoping she got caught and nothing worse but...’ ‘What’s her name?’ ‘Benita Castro Ocala Nieves.’ Iocone rose and went to the screen on Yolanda’s desk. ‘Where’d you get $100, Lester?’ Maddie asked. ‘Where?’ He shivered, then coughed into his fist. ‘Aw, man, you don’t wanna make extra work for yourself with questions like that.’ ‘No?’ ‘Seriously.’ Maddie let it slide. ‘Nothing,’ Iocone called out. ‘Did you check Brooklyn?’ ‘No, just Manhattan.’ ‘Could you check Brooklyn? She scores on South Second, South Third. No one scores in Manhattan anymore. Manhattan’s dead. You guys took care of that.’ Lester re-crossed his knees, a slice of grimy red long john peeking out between his pale blue ankle and the cuff of his jeans. ‘I mean, what the hell happened to her? She was gonna take me to the hospital. I have fluid in my lungs.’ ‘That’s no problem. We’ll get someone to take you as soon as we’re finished.’ ‘Nothing,’ Iocone called out. ‘She got a third name?’ ‘She’s not in the system, huh? Jesus, what do you think happened to her?’ he asked Maddie. ‘And me here. This is a felony, too, right?’ ‘Not necessarily. Depends on how you say what you say. You know, vis-à-vis, sincerity, remorse.’ ‘I am remorseful. I didn’t menace. I didn’t threaten. I didn’t say anything. What’s it terroristic?’ ‘All right, just capture that in your statement. In fact, if you want, we can even right your statement for you. But Lester, what can I tell you that you haven’t heard a million times before? You help us, we help...’ ‘You think this could go down as a pet law? I just-- I don’t even want-- I picked the fucking thing up off the sidewalk. I don’t even think anybody was gonna notice. When that big black guy started running after me, I was like here, take it. I didn’t even get to open the damned thing. I have no idea what was in there. Obviously, I’m not a pro at this.’ ‘Now, now, don’t get down on yourself,’ Iocone said from Yolanda’s desk. ‘You know, I gotta say right now, we’re pretty much eating out of garbage cans, me and Anita. But a few years ago, we had us a store worth like $200,000.’ ‘Oh, yeah?’ Maddie’s turn to yawn. ‘What kind of store?’ ‘It was like a punk boutique.’ ‘No kidding.’ ‘Can I have a cigarette? Jesus, I gotta get to the emergency room.’ ‘All right.’ Maddie clapped his hands. ‘Here we go, one time offer. The hell with the guys who shot that kid. Just give us the stickup team, just some names. Anybody you know works the hood. They check out, not only do you get a pass here, but we take you to the ER, get you squared away, then we go look for your girl.’ ‘A stickup team?’ Lester shrugged, re-crossed his legs, looked away. ‘You know, she used to use Carmen Lopez. That was like her professional name at this one place out in Massapequa. She’s a bar dancer, exotic, very good, very popular. I had her regulars. Guys would like to see her. And she could go to their houses, some of them, borrow 30, 40 dollars but she’s four months pregnant now so...’ Resting his brow on the curve of his free hand. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s time to go upstate. It’s getting too hard out here, you know.’” That’s it.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Re: How have drugs affected your work?

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:13:32 +0100

No one's ever written anything good on drugs, Price says.

Transcript:

Nobody in their right mind has ever done anything good on drugs work-wise. This always comes up because of Clockers. Back in the early ‘80s, I got messed up on sniffing coke, just like any other idiot who was making too much money and it really wrecked me for a couple of years in many ways, writing being just one of the ways. So in those three years, I don’t think I wrote two sentences worth a nickel but once I cleaned up and I started teaching at a rehab center in the Bronx at Day Top Village and crack was coming on the scene-- A lot of people are too young to remember now but like in the late ‘80s, crack was the most frightening word anybody ever heard. It was the essence of nihilism. It was the one word that was going to destroy everything in every city in America and I was kind of haunted by that. In fact, I was teaching kids, crack heads or who had been dealing crack and they were non-white, from broken homes, had some really awful histories and they were doing a drug 10 times worse than the sniffing coke that I took and they were doing it to cope and it made me crazy. So my own drug history sort of fueled me into sort of embracing how much worse it’s gotten since I stopped. At the same time, I started hanging out with cops to do Sea of Love, this police film and I went to a housing project in Jersey City. I’m from the projects but I was gone from projects culture in 1966. This is 20-plus years later and that place was a tiger cage. It was devastating. It looked like Beyond Thunderdome. I couldn’t imagine how anybody could live here. Actually, I got so freaked out by it that I just moved towards it, like a bird to a snake. In the long run, my drug experience sort of fueled all the stuff that got me back into writing. I finally felt an urgency about wanting to write something in a way that I didn’t want to put it up for screenplay fiddling.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

What Richard Price Loves About New York

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:13:30 +0100

Price prefers the old New York.

Transcript:

There are a lot of places I’ll never go back to like Times Square. It’s easy to get sentimental about a cheesy neighborhood that’s sort of turned sherbet pants, tourist safe, like everything is Lion King, Lion King, Lion King. I hate it. I don’t want to romanticize the scumminess of what it was in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But if I had to choose, I’d choose that. I’d choose all those guys wearing glen plaid, bell bottom pants and big afro bushes and tight leather jacks, peep shows. Even actual bookstores were in that neighborhood. Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. I remember I was five years old. My grandfather used to take me to a place called Grant’s which I think is where the New Amsterdam theater is. There’s this big bar that had sawdust on the floor. I didn’t even know what was going on. I was just spinning on the wheel and he was getting hammered. But yeah, Times Square has always pulled me and now, when I look back on it, coming out of a play, I go through it. I feel like I’m in Tokyo, the Ginza strip or something. I also feel like I’m in Peachtree Plaza. Or it could be anywhere. The whole thing of Times Square right now is this big beeping, blaring message, “It’s safe, it’s safe, it’s safe.” Maybe things are better not so safe. Lower East Side, once again, you can get sentimental about the fact that there were lines of heroin addicts going up to one apartment on Forsyth Street that now goes for $2 million, junkies versus yuppies. The thing to remember when people talk about how bad it was back then -- and it was bad; Alphabet City was terrifying -- for every kid getting in trouble, there was a kid in Seward Park High School who was graduating. The kid who graduates from Seward Park High School and gets a job is not newsworthy so you only know about the kids who kill or be killed. So there’s a very quiet, ongoing culture there that they’ve got to pull up stakes pretty soon.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Richard Price on New York Literature

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:13:29 +0100

The lag time of books.

Transcript:

You mean besides Lush Life? That’s a good question. I don’t know who’s writing about New York right now that’s taken on the zeitgeist right now. Usually it takes a couple of years for that. It’s like coming out of a war. The literature about that war doesn’t become great until a number of years passed. Now we’re getting tree to smoke about Vietnam. I don’t even know who’s writing what about New York.

Recorded On: 3/308

Re: What is the state of journalism today?

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:12:33 +0100

The pressure of turning a buck.

Transcript:

It’s kind of interesting because I’m not a journalist so I don’t really know much more than the average person except now, at the end of my book tour where I’ve been dealing with print media in 16 different cities, basically everybody’s complaining about the shrinking news hole. I could tell you at least in the culture pages, people are getting the same mandate that Season 5 had on The Wire, when they focused on the Baltimore Sun, where everybody’s saying do more with less. It’s all about trying to do twice as much with half the funds. The fact of the matter is you do less with less. That’s the math of it. But it’s interesting because I really viscerally got that on the book tour, where there used to be separate book sections and now you’re lucky if you get a column for a book.

The problem is that a lot of the papers are owned by bigger corporations, just like in publishing. A lot of the publishing houses are very small slices of the corporate pie and there’s much more pressure on turning over a buck than there is on indulging a possible break even or a loss simply because you’re doing good work and good work is important. The ownership is less and less personally involved with the reporters, with the subjects. It’s just about in Chicago, we own the Baltimore thing, 17 papers in cities we might not ever have been. We’re going to get rid of the people that you work with and you trust and we’re going to send in our guys, our specialists and these guys might not even know how to get a hamburger in that town and they’re running the paper. The whole point of letting somebody go is not to make room for somebody but to let somebody go and that hole just shuts. They’re talking about The Village Voice just let go Deborah Jowett [ph?] the dance critic and it’s not to get a new dance critic; it’s to shut that down because it’s not making a buck or whatever. Recorded On: 3/3/08

Richard Price on "The Wire"

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:12:31 +0100

Price says he doesn't feel the pressure of writing for a show with such a cult following.

Transcript:

No. It has a cultish following because it’s so riveting and I had been watching the show for two years before they approached me. So I was up to speed on every character. In fact, David Simon told me The Wire was based on Clockers. He wrote Homicide: A Year in the Life on the Streets and I wrote Clockers, both in 1992. We had the same editor, John Sterling. John Sterling put us together the night of the Rodney King verdict rioting. He and I had our first play date when we went over to Jersey City to watch the riots. So we’ve been friends since 1992 and he said Clockers is the book he meant to write so he did The Wire instead. You’ll see a lot of Clockers, especially in the first year or two. But he took Clockers. I never sort of rose about the trenches but he went all the way to the State Assembly. He went places I just didn’t have the smarts to go. I didn’t know enough. The Wire just became so panoramic that in fact, when he finally asked me to write for the show, my first reaction was to say no because I didn’t want to disappoint them because everybody thought since I wrote Clockers, I knew this stuff inside out. I emptied my pockets with Clockers. I thought these guys thought I had something special in a backpack. I was tapped but I got involved anyhow. They’re going to take what’s not working and make it work. That’s part of the collaborative medium.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Re: What was your most memorable collaboration?

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:12:28 +0100

Price loved working with Martin Scorsese.

Transcript:

I always love working with Scorsese because he had the confidence to know -- unlike a lot of directors -- exactly what he wanted. He said “Okay, you’re the writer. Give me this,” and he didn’t fret over it. He just went off and set up his shots. He sort of trusted me to deliver the goods. A lot of guys are like so anxious that they never know what they want and you get caught in the middle. You get into power plays between actors and directors. You feel like a secretary with a dog collar on. With Scorsese, it was like he just knew exactly what he wanted and it was a breeze. It’s never easy but it was relatively a breeze. Other people I worked with that I really liked is David Simon and the crew around The Wire. The only reason to do that show other than-- you sure don’t do it for the money. You open up the envelope and moths fly out. You do it because it’s The Wire and it seemed like a group of peers, although it wasn’t because Simon was the creator. The writer/producer/creator is always the guy that re-writes everything and is in control. But given that, there was none of the games. It was me and Pelecanos and Lehane and Ed Burns and David Simon and I felt like when we were all together, there was a sobriety of purpose and a mutual sympathy and respect for each other’s work that I rarely find in group situations like movie making. It was just a great show although frankly, it was so hard, I didn’t understand my own scripts most of the time. I did what I was told and then some. I was just really proud to be part of that.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Richard Ptice on Michael Jackson's "Bad"

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:11:32 +0100

It's hard to write a realistic script for Michael Jackson, Price says.

Transcript:

I cannot tell you how much that freaking video has come up. Yes, I did. I confess. I think it’s pretty funny. At the time, everybody’s reaction to it was a real freaky thing. I just wrote an eight page story leading up the song but when you’re writing it-- Quincy Jones went to Martin Scorsese who went to me and said “They want you to work with Michael Jackson.” How on earth are you going to say ‘no’ with that crew? Even just to have the experience and it was just an eight page script. I think I did a pretty good-- everybody did a good job. Michael Jackson did a decent job as an actor. Scorsese is Scorsese. I’m a good writer. The thing is, you can’t do a realistic script starring Michael Jackson, which is going to end in a song anyhow. It’s like everybody was great and the whole thing somehow was not. At the time, it was upsetting. At this point, it’s like comedy is tragedy plus time.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Richard Price on Screenwriting

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:11:30 +0100

Description: An ear for dialogue is a plus, Price says, but it isn't everything

Transcript:

The first couple of novels I wrote, The Wanderers and Blood Brothers, were picked up for movies and mistakenly and naively and shockingly naively, the filmmakers saw all the dialogue in the book and said “Wow, this guy would be a natural for screenplays,” even though a good ear for dialogue has nothing to do with being a good screenwriter. Screenplays are all about structure and momentum. If you have good dialogue, great; if you don’t have that dialogue, the actor will give it to you. He’ll make it human speech. If he doesn’t like what you’re saying, he’ll say it his own way and it’ll be better. A good ear is a plus but it’s not essential. I had a couple of offers for The Wanderers and Blood Brothers to go out there and write the scripts and I didn’t really take them on because I had a feeling I was very young and I felt like if I go out there now and start working on screenplays, I’ll never come back to novels. I waited until I had four books then I was just sort of burned out. I said I want to keep writing but I don’t know what to write about. Then I sort of called up all these people that had been proposing jobs to me over the years and I said let’s get going. Ironically, one of them was Scott Ruden who at the time I met him when they were shooting The Wanderers, was like a teenager and he was a casting director. Last week, he bought Lush Life. He buys a lot of books but he’s been kind of a patron of mine in terms of film rights for the last three books or so.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Richard Price on Becoming a Writer

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:11:28 +0100

By the time he was eleven, Price wanted to be a journalist, though he didn't quite know what that meant.

Transcript:

Honestly, yes. I found sort of a graduation autograph book from 6th grade. I must’ve been 11 years old. You give it to all the kids in your class and it’s a “Good luck, you loser.” There’s a page where you fill out your hopes and dreams and for some reason, I wrote down journalist. I didn’t even know what a journalist was and I spelled it right. So yeah, I guess I did.

No, I started writing in elementary school believe it or not. My grandfather was a factory worker but he also wrote poetry. He’s Russian. I would see his poems published on a mimeographed YMHA Journal in Brooklyn. This is in the ‘50s and I’d see this poem which I didn’t understand. Then I’d see his name in print and it kind of blew my mind. From that point on, I said I want to be a writer, too. It could be worse. He could’ve been a professional wrestler or an opera singer and then I really would’ve been screwed. I didn’t really think about “Why do I want to be a writer; what do I have to say?” until I was in my 20s. I think I just got by on sort of wit and facility with words. I didn’t think I had anything-- Who earlier than 20-something has anything substantial to say anyhow, but somehow, I just got sucked into that thing about wanting to be the writer. Every kid, when you’re a teenager, you have to have an ace in the hole. This kid, he’s the toughest. He’s the brain. He’s got the best hair. He’s the best dancer. He’s the writer but it was more gift wrapping than gift. I don’t think it was anything in my family. It’s a mystery to me. Nobody in my family is like me. My brother’s a vice president at Con Edison. He works in environmental affairs. My father is a cab driver. My mother was a bank teller. They’re all intelligent people but nobody displayed any kind of particular flair or humor or any affinity for Lenny Bruce or anything. It’s your basic, down the middle working-class nuclear family. I don’t know what happened to me.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Re: How has technology changed the way you work and live?

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:10:33 +0100

Richard Price, on the surprise of getting a hand-written letter.

Transcript:

For one thing, David Mamet wrote me a letter about two weeks ago and it was handwritten and other than the fact that it was from David Mamet, I realized it was the first time I’ve gotten a handwritten letter in about three years. I’ve always handwritten all my books. I finally switched over to using a laptop and the danger of a laptop is it’s too easy to fool around and move things around and do this and that. You’ve been very busy for three hours but you really haven’t done a thing. When you work with handwriting, it’s too labor intensive to go back. So I think it all evens out in the wash.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Re: Did you hit any writer's block while writing

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:10:30 +0100

Price says the writing was smooth.

Transcript:

No. Once I started writing it, I didn’t have writer’s block; I had the opposite problem. I started writing elements, pages and pages that somewhere I knew weren’t going to make the final cut. But it’s sort of like jogging on a sprained ankle. You know your ankle’s hurting but instead of the doing the sensible thing, which is stop running, you run faster. So once I realized I was going off into the woods over there, I worked twice as hard trying to jam that square peg into that round hole. I’ll have writer’s block between books and it’ll go for two years. I’ll be doing screenplay work just so I won’t sit there freaking out because I can’t think of anything to write a novel about. The good thing about screenplay work is somebody’s done the big think for you. They’ve said “Here’s the story. We want a story about so and so that’s involved with so and so.” I say okay, thanks. You gave me the idea. That’s all I need. I’ll do that. It’s like getting paid for writing but without the burden of making a huge statement every other year.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Richard Price on Writing Dialogue

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:10:28 +0100

Writing dialogue is a knack, Price says. Either you have it, or you don't.

Transcript:

It’s pretty intuitive. I think dialogue is a knack; either you have it or you don’t. A lot of writers find other elements of writing a lot easier than I do. I have a terrible time writing the King’s English. I couldn’t punctuate a four-word sentence if my life depended on it. I hear people. When I’m writing, I hear people. I do improv. I’ll be out on the street and I’ll pick up the rhythm of it but it’s not like anthropology. It’s not like I’m trying to get the glossary right. It’s just about expressing how somebody’s brain works through what comes out of their mouth. I went to management meetings at Schiller’s and I rode around with cops a lot. I was kind of a fly on the wall but all I’m basically looking for is what’s plausible. Before I start lying, let me lie responsibly. What are the parameters of plausibility and given that, once I know that if I do this, that’s way over the line of possibility, I won’t do it. The other thing is I want to write in such a way as somebody who’s showing me the ropes will read the book or see the movie or whatever it is, and not close the book or walk out of the theater like a third of the way through saying “Well, that was a waste of time.” They’re sort of my audience in an obsessive way. I want them to say “Wow, he really nailed it.” It’s arbitrary. It’s literature. It can be anything you want. It’s not social realism, it’s not photojournalism but I do have that obsessive desire to nail things for what it’s worth.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Re: What attracts you to the American city street?

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:09:34 +0100

For Richard Price, the projects are home.

Transcripts:

I think writers, no matter how many places you might settle in life, you’re always only from one place. For me, that’s working-class, outer-borough immigrant-- I grew up in a housing project so that tends to be home for me. When something sort of peaks my interest and makes me want to write, I always tend to be gravitating back towards that no matter what and I don’t really challenge it anymore. I just go with it. I’m not going to write about the Spanish armada just to show people I’m versatile. If that’s where something’s telling me to go, I just go and I do the best job I can and hopefully, every time out, I’m writing with a little more nuance and about a different facet about life. But a place is just a place. It’s all about the human nature. The only thing anybody ever writes about is trouble. You can find plenty of trouble. But by the same token, if I grew up in the Midwest, I’d probably be writing about farms and Midwestern life. If I was a southerner, I’d be trying to write like some third-rate William Faulkner. If I was from the desert, I’d write like Cormack McCarthy. You go back. You hear it calling to you your whole life no matter where you are.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Re: Has something been lost on the Lower East Side?

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:09:32 +0100

Description: Do you want to replace the junkies with the yuppies?

Transcript:

You can get all sentimental about it. There’s this big billboard on Houston Street saying “Where did all the junkies go?” Has something been lost on the Lower East Side? Yeah, it had a neighborhood identity. That neighborhood identity has gotten lost, that sense of community has gotten lost. But also, what’s gotten lost is about a million junkies. Do you want to replace junkies with yuppies?

+++

Maybe the truth lies in the middle somewhere. It’s still a neighborhood. It just has a different identity. But of course, the old guard is gone. The whole point of the book is that nothing is a done deal in New York. There’s no such thing as a complete transformation and a lot of people down there didn’t get the message that they don’t live there anymore because they’re still there.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Re: What inspired your characters?

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:09:28 +0100

Sometimes the best models are real people, Price says.

Transcript:

They say that the fact that if something really happens or a person really exists, that’s the defensive and mediocre novelist. In fact, there were a couple of real-life models, especially the police. There was a guy who used to be a robbery sergeant in the 7th Precinct who then became a homicide sergeant and he was involved in one of these cases, these sort of culture clash homicides. He sort of walked me through it and coached me through it. Then just by osmosis, I sort of picked up his demeanor and his personality for the catching detective. His partner, this Puerto Rican woman, Yolanda Bellows, is sort of based on his real-life partner. She was this sort of brilliant projects girl who was the A-#1 interrogator of the universe. She did it by transforming herself into the big sister/girlfriend/mother that these kids never had and she could make herself tear up on cue. She could talk to them like they were still back in the projects. She’d feel so freaked out for them and they loved her and told her anything she wanted to know. In fact, she even had a guy confess to the murder not because he did it, but because he thought it would help her career. She’s the only detective I know who still gets fan letters from prisons all around New York State saying “Yo, you said you were going to come visit me.” Both of them are fairly charismatic people. Other characters in the book are that whole world of 22 year olds. Sometimes I get criticized that I didn’t give them a break, I made them too self centered. But I think I was basically writing about how 22 year olds perceive the world. It is all about you. I have two kids, not that I used them for research, but my kids knew the Lower East Side better than I did five years ago because they knew where to go not to get carded; they knew where to hear music; they knew what clubs to meet their friends at; they could get into places that wouldn’t even look at me twice. What they didn’t know was that their great grandfather lived 100 yards from the Knitting Factory and was being put in the back of a paddy wagon because he just beat somebody up for money so his mother could pay rent. What I realized is a lot of these kids have made a full circle over five generations, that their family started out here maybe 1890/1900/1910 and here it is 2005/2006/2007 and they’re back down in the same neighborhood. I remember when I got a loft about a block or two above Houston and my grandfather was still alive. I said “You’ve got to come down and see this great place I have,” and he wouldn’t come. He said “What, are you mocking me? I spent my whole life trying to get out of there.” I couldn’t explain to him “No, no, no, it was different.” It was like trying to tell somebody “You’ve got to come back to Auschwitz. It’s really hip now.” It was a brutal place. It was a hell of a place. The whole point of the Lower East Side was to succeed because you didn’t have to live there anymore.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Re: Is the Eric Cash character based on anyone?

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:08:31 +0100

Richard Price writes his fears.

Transcript:

He’s sort of based on me. Eric Cash is a 35 year old maitre’d at a toine restaurant down there who is one of three people that get confronted in this mugging. The other two are young guys in their early 20s. One of them gets killed; the other one is so drunk he doesn’t remember the whole incident. The thing about Eric Cash is that he’s 35 and down on the Lower East Side, 35 looks like 65. It’s sort of like the tyranny of youth and the tyranny of “I’ll live forever and anything’s possible. Everything good will happen to me. Nothing bad has ever happened to me.” Eric went down to the Lower East Side when he was 22 just like the kids that are going down there now and he became a maitre’d but it was just a means to an end. He thought someday he was going to be a working actor, he was going to be a screenwriter or some kind of writer and maitre’d was just to pay the bills until glory happened. Well, all the hyphens have fallen off after maitre’d. Nothing’s panning out and he realizes that that’s what he is. He’s a maitre’d. There’s nothing wrong with being a maitre’d unless that’s not what you wanted to be. That was just like your starting point. The problem and the torment for him is that he’s surrounded by 22 year olds that were just like him 13 years ago and they’re a torment to him because they all think they’re going to make, they all think they’re going to live forever. When the murder goes down, Eric responds in a way he’s not proud of. He basically runs away and never calls 911. When the police get to the scene, they’re talking to Eric and they know he’s lying, that he’s covering something. Along with two bad eyewitnesses, they think they’ve got the shooter. Whatever wasn’t destroyed in him by being so close to a death, is eviscerated by the cops over the next eight hours in a closed room. And by the time the cops are done with him, you can pick him up with a Dust Buster. The problem is, once they realize they made a mistake and they locked up the wrong guy, they realize he’s their only true eye witness and he won’t cooperate with them. He’s just been wrecked.What I was writing about was what would happen to me if I were one of those kids at 22, which I was and I had an early publication. So I was like 24 when the Wanderers was published. But Eric Cash would’ve been me. Nothing ever broke for me. I don’t know if I would’ve been a maitre’d. I would probably have been one of a trillion lawyers somewhere. He’s the ghost of Christmas future, there but for the grace of God. I’ll never know that. First of all, I was an idiot. I wasn’t ambitious. I was still in school. I was just writing for my writing class. For me, when I had enough of those stories together and they went out and I heard they were going to get published, it was like the world’s best term paper ever. It didn’t even dawn on me that right now, you’re no longer a writer; you’re an author. Honestly, if I knew what the odds were, if I knew what I was intending to do a little more acutely, I probably would’ve been too psyched out to pursue it. It happened almost in spite of myself. I didn’t hustle in any way. The thing is that when I was 24, 22, 23, when I was going to Columbia, School of the Arts Writing Program, if the Lower East Side was like the way it is now back then, I probably would’ve crawled on broken glass to go down there and be in that neighborhood. I would’ve loved the playground like that. I probably also would’ve been maybe not as oblivious as a lot of kids to the other worlds down there because I come from a house project, but I would pretty much be focused on other people like me. It was like one big Little Rascals clubhouse.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Re: How do you handle a touchy subject?

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:08:30 +0100

I'll do anything in my power not to be PC short of being insulting, Price says.

Transcript:

I’ll do anything in my power not to be PC short of being insulting. PC has its own repressiveness just as much as any kind of right-wing insensitivity. When I’m writing about people that it might seem should be the territory of the people you’re writing about if I’m writing about black characters or Hispanic characters. The only obligation of a writer whose job is to imagine lives not your own is to make the characters as three dimensional as possible. If you can do that, there’s no one off limits.

Recorded On: 3/3/08

Re: What inspired you to write Lush Life?

Bigthink — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:08:28 +0100

Description: A robbery turned suicide on New York's Lower East Side.

Transcript:

The story centers around a robbery turned homicide on the streets of the Lower East Side. It’s a fictional version of a couple things that have happened over the years down there. What the real story is behind that is the culture clash between the people that had been living there for at least a half a century and the new wave of younger middle-class kids that have been coming down for about 10 years. To my experience, all the groups that are down there -- the Orthodox Jews, the Fujanese [ph?] Chinese, the Hispanics, and blacks that live in the housing projects, the old hippy guard and the new entrepreneurs and the new kids -- they live in their own worlds but they occupy the same physical streets but they don’t really acknowledge each other until something happens in the middle of the night. A couple of kids from the projects maybe venture inland to Ludlow Street and see if they can mug two kids from the Midwest and every once in a while, something will go wrong because these kids from the Midwest are not too street smart, they’ve been bar hopping, there’s a gun involved, and instead of just giving over their wallet and living to fight another day, they’ll make a move to the gun or they’ll say something challenging. A shot’s fired, you’ve got headlines for five days and on day six, everybody goes back to their respective worlds. The novel centers around a fictional incident like that. That happened actually after I started writing this because there had been something previous a few years before that, that I was thinking about. Things like this are pretty rare. It’s pretty safe down there, I think in terms of the precincts. I think it’s one of the safer precincts. One of the reviewers said that the cops down there have become almost park rangers. But the problem is it’s New York City and anything can and will happen at any time. It’s like a safe tiger. There’s no such thing.

Recorded On: 3/3/08